Vibe Coding to Production: The Checklist

The demo worked. That is the most dangerous moment in the whole build.

AI gets you to 80% in an afternoon now. It gets you there so fast that the remaining 20% feels like admin, so people skip it and push the thing live.

Then the real users arrive.

No version control, so the working version is gone,
API key sitting in the frontend bundle where anyone can read it,
No input validation, so one bad form post takes the app down,
Logged in treated as the same thing as allowed,
No backups, and the first one you ever try to restore is during the outage 🔥

I wrote the whole checklist. 14 checks, in order, each one with what breaks if you skip it and the smallest version that counts as done.

Real commands. A .gitignore, an .env.example, a backup line, a health check endpoint.

Free. No email wall.

Comment "SHIP" 👇 and I'll send it to your DMs.